Hegseth: Military chaplains will no longer display rank

U.S. military chaplains will no longer wear their rank insignia, instead displaying insignia that reflects their religious affiliation, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced as part of two major changes to the group. In a memo signed Tuesday and announced in a video message, Hegseth said chaplains will retain their rank as officers, but it will not be shown as “this speaks to the difficult balance of the duality” of the role. “A chaplain is first and foremost a chaplain and an officer second. This change is a visual representation of that fact, specifically unique to the role of a chaplain. They are first and foremost called and ordained by God,” Hegseth said. They will instead “be seen among the highest ranks because of their divine calling,” he added. Hegseth also said the move would make chaplains more accessible by reducing “any unease or anxiety” service members may have in approaching a superior to discuss sensitive issues. Chaplains, the commissioned officers acting as religious leaders and counselors to service members and their families, have been part of the military since 1775, when President George Washington established the Chaplain Corps as an exclusively Protestant group. In the mid-1800s, Catholic and Jewish chaplains were introduced, followed by the first Muslim chaplain in 1994 and a Buddhist in 2008. In 2017, the Armed Forces Chaplains Board reviewed the Defense Department’s recognized faith groups to provide more accurate demographic data on religious beliefs held by service members across the armed forces. It listed more than 200 different faith codes, many of them specific religious groups under the wider umbrella of Protestant. Under the Biden administration in February 2024, Army Chaplain Corps guidelines said the group represented more than 100 religious groups. But Hegseth said that moving forward, the Pentagon would use 31 faith codes instead of the more than 200, which he called an “impractical and unusable system,” with many codes never used at all. “An overwhelming majority of the military population used only six of the codes,” he said, adding that a more streamlined system will support chaplains in ministering to service members “in a way that aligns with that service member’s faith background and religious practice.” The Pentagon did not respond to The Hill’s inquiry on the new list of 31 faith codes it would use moving forward. Hegseth also stressed that the Pentagon is “not even close to being done” in taking steps toward “restoring the esteemed position of chaplain as moral anchors of the fighting force.” Service members’ spiritual health “is equally important” as their physical and mental health, Hegseth said, complaining that previous administrations infected the Chaplain Corps with “political correctness and secular humanism,” changing and watering down the role’s core functions “until they were viewed by many as nothing more than therapists.” “A warfighter needs more than a coping mechanism,” he said. “They need truth, big-T truth, they need conviction, they need a shepherd.” The change reflects the latest step in Hegseth’s effort to inject the military with more explicitly religious sentiments. He has focused on shaping the military’s culture in more traditional Christian conservative views, enacting policy that bans transgender troops, reviewing whether women should serve in combat roles and reevaluating the Defense Department’s support for Scouting America unless it institutes “core value reforms.” Since last spring, Hegseth has held a monthly prayer service at the Pentagon, in one such setting inviting controversial Christian nationalist pastor, Doug Wilson, to give a sermon. Hegseth is the Trump administration’s most prominent member of Wilson’s church — the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches — which preaches that homosexuality should be a crime, women should submit to their husbands, the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote should be repealed, and Christians who owned slaves in the South “were on firm scriptural ground.”